Steve's Politics Blog

All the corporate media seem to be carrying this story. Here is an article in U.S. News that is typical, US Employers Add Strong 222K Jobs; Jobless Rate at 4.4 Pct.

The proportion of adults with jobs has reached 60.1 percent, just below April’s figure, which was the highest since the recession ended in 2009.

When the numbers seem to tell a different story from the one that many people experience, it makes me wonder what could be wrong with the numbers. I think I have figured it out.

When one job per family was enough to support a middle class lifestyle, this method of measuring unemployment gave a reasonably accurate measure of how the economy was doing. When it takes 2 to 4 or more jobs per family to support a middle-class lifestyle, the way we measure full employment needs to be changed. If 100% of adults had a job, but it took four jobs to support a family, than a two earner family would only be 50% employed, or 50% unemployed compared to what would be needed to support a robust economy. In such a circumstance, the traditional measure of employment would say that there was 100% employment. If the number by the traditional measurement could be off by a factor of two, wouldn’t someone wake up to the fact that we aren’t measuring the right thing?

Business Insider has the article 2 Silicon Valley billionaires want to reinvent the Democratic Party with a new project called ‘WTF’

“We need a modern people’s lobby that empowers all of us to choose our leaders and set our agenda,” said Mark Pincus, the billionaire cofounder of Zynga who is partnering with Hoffman to start WTF. “Imagine voting for a president we’re truly excited about. Imagine a government that promotes capitalism and civil rights.”

Here is the first question they should ask us to vote on. “Should the rules be written so that people like them do not end up being billionaires?”

The fact that a few people become billionaires is the crux of the problem. I don’t have any ideas about how the rules should be rewritten. It just seems obvious to me that if a few people around the world become billionaires while too many people go hungry, then the system is broken.

Alternet has the article Exclusive: Seymour Hersh Dishes on New Exposé Upending the Official Story About Trump and Syrian Chemical Attacks.

Ken Klippenstein: Why is the deconfliction process by which forces in Syria notify each other of air operations to avoid accidents so important?

Seymour Hersh: More air force is involved than people think. It’s not only Russian… Syria’s flying, Russia’s flying, America’s flying… The Brits fly, the Canadians fly, the Aussies fly. It’s sort of like air [traffic] control at an airport… We have something called AWACS. It’s a big plane that monitors everything and the Russians and the Syrians will communicate their routes and their packets and where they’re going and what they’re delivering in English to these aircraft, AWACS, which monitor large parts of Syria. So there’s a lot of coordination. That’s what deconfliction is.

Seems like war is a well planned game among a bunch of civilized imperialists against indigenous people who won’t build the pipelines the way the imperialists want. Its just business. Nothing against the defenseless civilians being killed. Unfortunate collateral damage, but pipelines got to go where pipelines have to go. We see this in our own country.

The Real News Network has the interview The Nina Turner Show: No Is Not Enough with Naomi Klein,

At the 2017 People’s Summit, Naomi Klein explains why fighting Trump requires political imagination.

Naomi Klein has a very important message that goes beyond resistance. She makes the point that I often mention that you cannot beat something with nothing. If you want to win power, you need to have a positive vision of what you want to build instead of what exists that you oppose.

I made this point in a post in June of 2011, The White House Needs a Real Jobs Plan.

As I have tried to make it clear to Democratic politicians before, you cannot beat something with nothing. Rather than merely explain what is wrong with the Republican plan, the Democrats have to come up with an obviously better plan. If they have an obviously better plan, they don’t even have to talk about the Republican’s plan. Staying positive was a lesson that Obama taught us all in his campaign for the Presidency.

The Real News Network has this interview Nina Turner on Her New Role As President of Our Revolution.

Nina Turner and Paul Jay discuss the fight against corporate democrats from the struggle for single payer in California to electing progressives countrywide, and take viewer questions live on air

I have a lot of hope for Nina Turner’s leadership of “Our Revolution”. I like the way she speaks so forthrightly about the issues. I agree with her specific take on the Russian issue. It is not that we don’t need to know the facts, but the problem is having already come to the decisions on what punishments to impose before we have the slightest clue as to the facts.

I can understand that the focus of her organization is on domestic issues that impact the American people. However issues of trade and war are frequently not thought of as domestic issues, but they still have a major impact on the residents of this country. I hope that “Our Revolution” as an organization will act like they fully understand the tight connection with these issues and life in these United States.

The Intercept has the article Seymour Hersh Blasts Media for Uncritically Promoting Russian Hacking Story,

Hersh denounced news organizations as “crazy town” for their uncritical promotion of the pronouncements of the director of national intelligence and the CIA, given their track records of lying and misleading the public.
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Although critical of the Russia coverage, Hersh condemned the Trump administration’s attacks on the news media and its threats to limit the ability of journalists to cover the White House.

One thing that I like about the article is that it shows you can be critical of the Russia coverage and not be a Trump sycophant at the same time. That’s my position.

I previously posted this story.

The Antimedia has the article Seymour Hersh: US Lied About Syrian Chemical Attack Then Bombed Them Anyway.

Those commentators who can review these startling revelations but still condone Trump’s actions with a lazy ‘Assad is still a bad guy and must be overthrown’ mindset argument are being intellectually dishonest, with themselves and others. As was the case in 2013, there is still very little evidence that Assad has ever used chemical weapons — particularly in the attacks that the U.S. has tried to pin on him — yet this is the standard by which the corporate media and our respective governments have instructed us to judge Assad. Even without this conclusive evidence, shortly after the April events, U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley stated Assad will fall from power.

People who don’t read stories like this would have no reason to doubt the lies published in the corporate media. I do read these stories, and tend to believe what Seymour Hersh writes. It is very frustrating to have this “knowledge” while reading commentary from people who don’t know or refuse to entertain the possibility of what Seymour Hersh writes.

YouTube has the video MMT for You and Me.

Part 1 rolls right into Part 2 if you keep watching. Part 1 just sets up the question, Part 2 answers it. The whole thing is like 5 minutes long, but it can change the way you view the government and the economy.

If this very short introduction makes you curious, then there are posts all over this blog that point to much more detailed information about MMT.

Black Agenda Report has the opinion piece Why Bernie Sanders is an Imperialist Pig.

Bernie Sanders is a highly valued Democrat, the party’s Outreach Director and therefore, as Paul Street writes, “the imperialist and sheep-dogging fake-socialist Democratic Party company man that some of us on the ‘hard radical’ Left said he was.” Sanders is a warmonger, not merely by association, but by virtue of his own positions. He favors more sanctions against Russia, in addition to the sanctions levied against Moscow in 2014 and 2016 for its measured response to the U.S-backed fascist coup against a democratically elected government in Ukraine. Rather than surrender to U.S. bullying, Russia came to the military aid of the sovereign and internationally recognized government of Syria in 2015, upsetting the U.S. game plan for an Islamic jihadist victory.

Although there is a hint that Bernie Sanders may have come to his senses lately. See my previous blog post Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul Buck Party Consensus on Russia and Iran Sanctions.

Naked Capitalism has posted a transcript and a video of The Real News Network‘s interview David Sirota: The Role of Journalism in the Age of Trump.

DAVID SIROTA: Well I mean, you’ve got to ask the question why hasn’t there been more of a forceful, coherent policy resistance to Trump? I think it’s because the Democratic Party is constantly caught between knowing what it should do to win elections, which is propose a positive policy vision on issues that are popular. They’re caught between that and their donor class, and so there is this constant search by Democratic operatives and pundits and politicians to try to find on the Venn diagram, some middle ground. “Where can we satisfy the public and also appease our donors?” That crossover in the Venn diagram is getting narrower and narrower because what the public wants is becoming in direct opposition to what the donor class wants.

On my better days, this is what I try to do on this blog. I try to report important policy facts irrespective of where they come from or who what individual person they impact. I am more interested on the impact on our society as a whole than I am on protecting one person’s privilege.